


Lapidarian

by eleutheria_has_won



Series: Bondmates AU [3]
Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Bonds, Gen, Loss, PTSD, Trauma, war buddies, wow is Gregor ever messed up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 18:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1993794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you tell a child that they have to die, that leaves scars; these will - inevitably - need healing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lapidarian

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is all lorata's fault. Blame them.
> 
> Also, this is a repost, because AO3 was doing something seriously funky with the last version. It kept not showing up in my works or the fandom page. >:[

lapidarian (adj.) of, like, pertaining to, or inscribed on stones

 

Twitchtip was very good at pretending she was paying absolutely no attention to something that she was, in fact, paying attention to; in return for that small kindness, Gregor tried to pretend he didn't know Twitchtip was watching him very carefully for signs of exhaustion. Physical or otherwise.

“ _You were his bond, after all_ ,” the army captain had said, “ _It is only right that you decide what is to be done_.”

Gregor, sitting in the hospital bed with Twitchtip curled on the ground beside it, had thanked him politely for bringing the news. Then he had stayed there and stared at his hands for hours, until Twitchtip had awoken and asked him what was wrong, don’t bother denying it, I can smell it on you.

So Gregor had told her.

Here and now, Gregor’s ribs twinged as he carefully levered himself up the rocky slope. He leaned against rocks for a moment, bracing his hands on his knees, and let his eyes fall shut, breathing carefully. Twitchtip, clambering up after him a moment later, paused and stared at him thoughtfully.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said softly. “You could just leave it-” Twitchtip indicated the distant torches of the work patrols sweeping the other caverns, “-to them.”

Eyes still closed, Gregor shook his head. “No,” he said, just as softly. “I can’t.”

“...okay.”

Gregor pushed himself up, took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and climbed on.

After Gregor had told her, never once looking up from his hands, Twitchtip had looked at him for a long time, nose twitching contemplatively. She had leaned forward, nudged his hands with her nose - hard - and when he had jumped and looked up at her, eyes wide with shell shock, she had looked him dead in the eye and said, “ _So?_ ”

Gregor had stared at her. “ _S-_ ” he had stammered.

“ _What about it?_ ” Twitchtip had interrupted forcefully. “ _Do something or don’t. No, don’t sit here, stuck in your head. Decide._ ”

So he had.

They reached the top of the plateau together. Gregor felt the shaking in his hands, the weakness which lingered even several months after he had woken up in the Regalian hospital. (Several months after he-) Impatient, he pressed his hands against his thighs to stop the shaking. Gregor knew it wouldn’t fool Twitchtip - who was, after all, his bond, and thus the one keeping an eye on him to make sure he didn’t overstress and who would call this all off if she thought he wasn’t strong enough for it. But it made him feel better all the same. After a moment, he glanced around.

And there they were, just as the messenger had told him.

Gregor walked past the stretched-out pile in the center of the mesa, sparing only a glance and a sad smile for the set of enormous bleached bones that had once been a white rat named Pearlpelt. The rest of his attention belonged to the smaller bones off to the side, the undisturbed skeleton of a bat the size of a horse stretched out on its back. Its wings were bent at awkward angles. The left claw was missing.

Gregor crouched next the skull and rested his fingertips on the forehead. It felt cold, rough, little different from the stone it rested on. Like nothing alive. “Hello, Ares,” he whispered.

If tears dripped onto the bone and trickled down, no one was there to see it but Twitchtip.

They spent an age there in silence, listening to the soft bustling sounds of work patrols retrieving the dead in the distance. “I knew that the warrior was supposed to die,” said Gregor eventually, “weeks before all-” he waved a hand at the plateau, the darkness, the bones, “- _this_ happened.”

Twitchtip nodded slowly, settling down to the ground.

“I...I didn’t know how to deal with it. With...dying. I mean, I was - I’m still twelve years old. How do you deal with the idea that you’re going to die?” Gregor laughed hoarsely. “You don’t. So I...there’s this place in the Overland, the Cloisters, I went there for a school trip or- or something. Anyway, when I was there, I saw this statue. This stone carving of a knight, lying on top of the real knight’s grave. And he looked... peaceful. At peace. Like death was nothing but…a rest, where your problems fell away, and you could finally just… _rest_.”

Twitchtip’s tail moved uneasily.

Gregor smiled bleakly. “Every time,” he said, taking a deep breath, “every time I thought about my death. How I was going to die. I thought about the stone knight, to comfort myself. He’d done his job and gotten his rest...and so would I.”

Gregor rubbed his thumb over the ridges of the skull under his hand, smiling down into those empty eye sockets, sad and fond.

“...but the knight couldn’t tell me how to _live_ , afterward,” he whispered.

It was silent for a long time. He was grateful for that.

Twitchtip stirred and asked, “What do you want to do with him?” She didn’t have to clarify who she was talking about.

“...he would want to be where the rest are,” said Gregor. “Even just his bones.”

“That works,” Gregor’s bond said.

Twitchtip fetched a large leather satchel from the patrols and held it open for him, but she let him gather the bones on his own. He was grateful for that, too. It took hours to find every last bone; she never once told him to hurry.

At the funeral - a tiny affair, only him, her, Luxa, and Aurora - where they emptied the bag onto the tiny woven boat and sent it down the waters, Twitchtip sidled up beside him and clasped his right hand in her claws. A bonding grip, and oh how that _hurt_ in that moment, how _exquisitely_ painful it was, to hold his second bond’s claw like that while watching the bones of his first float away.

But the hurt was good, too.

Gregor didn’t speak very often, in the days after Ares’s funeral. His family worried; his friends assured themselves he would spring back, and then proceeded to grow increasingly grim when he didn’t. Only Twitchtip knew how tired he really was. The nightmare had gone from plaguing him once a week at most to waking him up screaming once or twice a night at least. It started any number of ways - running from rats, stumbling lost in the jungle, drowning in quicksand - but it always, always ended in falling. Every night, Gregor sat bolt upright in bed, or tumbled off the edge, screaming for Ares and clutching at his chest where the dream stalagmite had pierced it. It always took him hours to get back to sleep after that, and Twitchtip took one sniff of his exhaustion and the leftover fear smell the next morning and gave him a look he couldn’t interpret. Every time.

After a week of this, Gregor was in his Underland rooms getting ready to sleep - glaring at the bed every few minutes in trepidation - when Twitchtip skulked into the room without a word and under Gregor’s disbelieving stare promptly made a nest of one half of his bed and curled up in it.

“Well?” she snapped when he kept staring.

He slept better that night, and longer, but in the early hours of the morning he still woke gasping against Twitchtip’s side, clawing at his chest and leaving red welts behind. The next night, he had no nightmare at all, for the first time in a week. The night after that, he screamed himself awake after barely an hour of sleep, and it was only exhaustion that let him sleep again, just before morning. The night after that, he didn’t sleep at all, only dozed in the curve of Twitchtip’s side; every time he let himself drift off, flashes of blood and stone and falling jolted him awake again.

It was getting into the early hours of the morning when Twitchtip sighed through her nose - the old break meant it whistled slightly - and rolled over. Very careful, she crouched over Gregor and pinned him between her forepaws, looking him in the face. The half-darkness of his rooms made her look both childishly spooky and eerily prophetic.

“This isn’t working,” she said plainly. For a heart-stopping moment, he thought she meant their bond. Fear and betrayal seized him. Twitchtip frowned. “You can pretend to them, but not to me,” she huffed. “Whatever you’ve done so far for grieving, it’s not enough. You need something more.”

“I...” he breathed, confusion choking him. “Twitchtip...”

Twitchtip gave him a skeptical look, which softened as her nose twitched and she caught the scent of his fear. “Come with me,” she said. She lifted her weight off him and slid nimbly off the bed. Gregor had no choice but to follow.

Though Gregor would scarcely have believed it, antisocial and misanthropic as she was, Twitchtip still understood how to throw her weight as bond of the Warrior around. A quiet conversation with a bat guard, and within no time at all Gregor and Twitchtip were flying away from Regalia on the back of a bat Gregor had seen around the palace once or twice. An hour or so’s flight later, the bat was setting them down on a hatefully familiar plateau.

“Oh, no,” Gregor muttered. “Oh, no way. Twitchtip-”

“Yes,” Twitchtip said calmly, watching as the bat flew away to the far reaches of the cavern, “Yes.”

“Why- no, you know what? I don’t want to know why,” Gregor growled.

Twitchtip snorted, “But you still have to face it.”

Gregor bared his teeth in a vicious snarl he had learned from her, but didn’t stop her when she hooked her claws around the back of his neck and used it to draw him a little closer. She stopped awkwardly. A life of isolation had left Twitchtip both starved for touch and uncertain of it. She was the one who had brought him here, and tugged him close, but it was Gregor who leaned forward against her side and finished the movement.

After a moment,Twitchtip touched his hand briefly with the other paw; Gregor opened his fingers long enough for her to clasp it. When she let go, his hand fell to his side and clenched into a fist. Face buried in Twitchtip’s fur, her claws prickling along the back of his neck, Gregor could let himself begin to tremble, shaking as the memories which were closest to his thoughts right now - this place, he could see it, the sound of his muffled choking was loud enough to see by and it brought so much back he would have rather left behind, oh god, _he didn’t want to die_ \- swept through him and left him empty in their wake.

They stood there for a very long time, until Gregor’s legs began to tremble for a different reason. It had been several months since he’d nearly died (several months since he had lost Ares), and though he’d regained a lot of strength, he still wasn’t what he’d been. Twitchtip held him up until the bat who’d brought them returned and she could bundle him onto the bat’s back. As they rode, for the first time, Gregor could feel the weight of two weeks of exhaustion finally settling on him. The grief and pain which had kept it at bay had faded away. He was half-asleep by the time the city lights came into view, and Twitchtip directed the bat in murmurs to the balcony closest to his rooms. Well, _their_ rooms, now, he thought fuzzily. It wasn’t like she was going to leave him alone _now_ , and the thought went a long way toward banishing any pain that lingered.

By the time they landed, Gregor could barely walk on his own. Despite the fact that it was mid-morning by Regalian time, Twitchtip didn’t try to really wake him, but instead let him lean on her until they reached their rooms and she could affectionately shove him in the direction of the bed. He sat down on the edge of it, eyes closed and yawning, but without the energy to swing his legs up and lie back. Instead, he reached out, caught Twitchtip’s shoulder, and pulled her into a tight hug.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“Leave the stone to the stones,” she muttered in his ear. “Telling you how to live is my job.”

After all, Gregor thought as he smiled into her fur, stone couldn't teach you to remember how to breathe.


End file.
